In certain wireless radio access networks, a base station communicates with user equipment (UEs) in full-duplex mode while the UEs communicate with the base station in half-duplex (HD) mode. The full-duplex capability of the base station allows the base station to communicate simultaneously, and within the same frequency band, with two UEs, say, a first UE in the uplink direction and a second UE in the downlink direction.
However, transmission of uplink traffic from the first UE will tend to interfere with reception of downlink traffic at the second UE, depending on various factors such as the relative distance between the two UEs. As such, when there are many UEs that may communicate with the base station in half-duplex fashion, judicious pairing of UEs for uplink and downlink transmission using the same time and frequency resources may improve performance.